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Journal of Undergraduate Research

Keywords

foreign language, Sophie Digital Library, German-speaking women, Hildegard von Bingen

College

Humanities

Department

German and Russian

Abstract

Researchers seeking historical primary and secondary source documents in a foreign language must often overcome the challenge of finding those resources without actually travelling to their country of origin. The Sophie Digital Library is an online database that was created by BYU faculty to address a very specific aspect of this problem, by gathering and making available works and research specifically related to German-speaking women. Because the Sophie Digital Library enjoys a broad group of users across the world, who rely upon its digital collections, much effort is expended to provide reliable resources and documents related to German-speaking women from a variety of fields. For my ORCA project, my faculty mentor and I identified a well-known female composer from the 12th century named Hildegard von Bingen, who is not currently featured in the Sophie Digital Library. Hildegard von Bingen is an important historical figure, who is remembered for her theological treatises, her well-recorded visions from God about salvation, scriptures and the nature of the divine, and her musical compositions. Almost as important as her own works and writings is the research published about her life prior to the 19th century unification of Germany in an attempt to create a common Germanic history. Much of this research is primarily available as hard copies in European libraries and collections, available only to scholars with access to European archives or a very few North American research libraries, who hold non-circulating copies. In order to broaden the availability of these resources, I was able to digitize approximately 1200 pages of text, which will be added to the Sophie Digital Library website, along with a short biography and scholarly introduction based on my own research.

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